Imagine you're running a factory that consumes Aluminum and produces Aluminum cans. If the half of the sources that supply your raw material inputs go offline, then you'll either pay more for the supply from marginal producers or reduce your output. In either case, you'll be forced with a decision to raise the price of your product to maintain your margin or reduce your output.
A downstream consumer of your cans will either see their prices rise for their inputs (your cans) and call it inflation, or they will have to source additional cans from additional marginal suppliers at additional costs because your volume dropped. The average cost of cans will have increased and that's inflation too.
Economist here. I think you may be confused in the definition of inflation. I responded to another comment of yours, and will reiterate a good writeup I recommend reviewing for improving your understanding on what inflation is: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/05/012005.asp
Cost-push and demand-pull theories of inflation have been discredited by Reisman in "Capitalism".
And as Milton Friedman wrote, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output."
Of course, this is saying the same thing as the Law of Supply & Demand. More money being created wrt the goods and services it represents mean the money gets devalued.
> We evaluate the merits of the "supply-side" view under which inflation results from sectoral shocks, and compare it with the "classical" view in which inflation results from aggregate factors such as variations in money growth. Using a panel VAR methodology applied to data for 13 GECD countries, we find support for a multi-shock view of inflation: supply-side shocks are statistically significant determinants of inflation, even after taking into account aggregate demand factors. While oil prices are the dominant supply-side influence, other measures such as the skewness of relative price changes are important as well. At short horizons, an innovation to skewness leads to an increase in inflation of 0.5 percentage points. As suggested by the classical view, money growth plays an increasingly important role as the time horizon lengthens.
The paper identifies energy (oil in 1995) as the main driver of supply-side inflation which seems reasonable to me because all of our economies use energy, and so changes in the supply of energy would cause shocks across the economy that would result in complex downstream ripple effects. We can watch this play out in Germany today, where they lack sufficient energy to fuel their economy due to the loss of Russian nat gas.
Be careful with the Austrian School of Economics, because it masquerades as meaningful but under the hood is a religious faith as it rejects the need for measurement and the scientific method. Some ideas pass the logic filter for many people's lived experience without being accurate.
Hence, it is incorrect to say "Cost-push and demand-pull theories of inflation have been discredited" -- a more accurate assertion would be "the theories of cost-push and demand-pull inflation are argued against, unconvincingly to most but convincingly to me" since most people, including economists, do not adopt the tenets, rites, and axioms of the Austrian School. Note, your personal Austrian School-driven interpretation for what constituties inflation is likely why you are receiving pushback in this thread.
A downstream consumer of your cans will either see their prices rise for their inputs (your cans) and call it inflation, or they will have to source additional cans from additional marginal suppliers at additional costs because your volume dropped. The average cost of cans will have increased and that's inflation too.